O happy Tithon! if thou know'st thy hap, And valuest thy wealth, as I my want, Then need'st thou not—which ah! I grieve to grant— Repine at Jove, lull'd in his leman's lap: That golden shower in which he did repose— One dewy drop it stains Which thy Aurora rains Upon the rural plains, When from thy bed she passionately goes.
Then, waken'd with the music of the merles, She not remembers Memnon when she mourns: That faithful flame which in her bosom burns From crystal conduits throws those liquid pearls: Sad from thy sight so soon to be removed, She so her grief delates. —O favour'd by the fates Above the happiest states, Who art of one so worthy well-beloved!
Mild splendor of the various-vested Night! Mother of wildly-working visions! hail! I watch thy gliding, while with watery light Thy weak eye glimmers through a fleecy veil; And when thou lovest thy pale orb to shroud Behind the gather’d blackness lost on high; And when thou dartest from the wind-rent cloud Thy placid lightning o’er the awaken’d sky.
Ah such is Hope! as changeful and as fair! Now dimly peering on the wistful sight; Now hid behind the dragon-wing’d Despair: But soon emerging in her radiant might She o’er the sorrow-clouded breast of Care Sails, like a meteor kindling in its flight.
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Track 1
How this picture is made
What a fractal is
A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. The large form and the small form are the same kind of thing. A poem can be drawn that way. The shape of the whole comes from the shape of the lines.
Primunia is the name for the source of that order: the pattern under the pattern, already there in a tree, a shell, and a verse.
How the boundary is drawn
The number under the picture is the poem constant. It is read from the build of the lines: their length, how uneven they are, the size of the stanzas, the share of vowels, and the way the lines end. A new word moves the number when it changes that build. The same poem always gives the same number.
Drawn on its own, that number sits in a quiet part of the plane, and most poems would look like the same soft disk. So the number is carried outward along its own direction until it meets the edge of the Mandelbrot set, where the shape turns sharp. The picture is the Julia set of that meeting place.
Each point on the canvas is folded again and again by one small rule. Points that stay near the rule form the dark interior. Points that rush away become the coloured bands. The hue comes from the poem constant, and the brightest bands turn toward gold. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.
What the branching signifies
Branching draws the poem as a tree. Each turn follows a line, and every smaller branch repeats that pattern. A longer line reaches farther. The letters at the start of a line bend the next turn. A higher share of vowels opens the branches wider.
The trunk takes its colour from the poem constant and warms toward gold at the tips. When the poem has more than one stanza, gold forks leave the trunk. Each fork is a stanza beyond the first, up to three. The tree divides where the poem divides. One stanza remains a single trunk.